Mathieu Aubin, photo taken by Alex Drake

Ph.D. student from FCCS chosen to attend prestigious summer program at Cornell University

Mathieu Aubin, a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, is one of a select group of advanced graduate students chosen to attend the prestigious School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University for six weeks this summer.

Aubin came to UBC Okanagan after attending TeMIC, held in the summer of 2013 and 2014 on this campus, and notes that the smaller campus feel, the top notch research at this university, and the idea of working with Dr. Karis Shearer, compelled him to apply for the Ph.D. program in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies, starting in 2014.

The summer institute at Cornell University is a six-week intensive program in which faculty members and graduate students from around the world, working in literature and related social sciences, will explore recent developments in critical theory. Aubin will be working alongside leading scholars and theorists, such as Homi Bhabha, Marjorie Levinson, and Timothy Murray.

“This is an important stepping stone in my career and an amazing opportunity to work with some of the leading scholars in this field who have inspired some of my work.” says Aubin.

Top institutions in the U.S. have internal competitions to choose a student to put forward for the program at Cornell. In Aubin’s case, he applied directly, producing a proposal demonstrating why he wanted to be there, his research areas, and what he would bring to the School. Aubin is one of only a few scholars attending from Canada.

Dr. Margaret Reeves, IGS Program Coordinator for FCCS, says that “we are enormously proud of Mathieu Aubin’s accomplishments this year. He will no doubt do us proud at Cornell.”

photo by Darren Hull

Aubin has been a very active and engaged student over the past two years that he has been at UBC Okanagan. He was recently a recipient of the Provost’s Teaching Award; won a Kent Haworth Archival Research Fellowship from York University; assisted in the teaching of a Canadian Literature course with Dr. Shearer; worked as a graduate writing assistant in the Centre for Scholarly Communications; was part of the organizing committee of the 2015 Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference on this campus; was the graduate student representative on the FCCS Graduate Programs and Planning Committee for 2016; hosted the Wonderment of bill bissett in October of 2015; and participated in the Human Library event this past winter.

Aubin’s research focusses on the intersection between Vancouver avant-garde poetry from the 1960s to 1980s, by poets such as bill bissett and Daphne Marlatt, and Vancouver’s lesbian and gay liberation movement. He is looking at the development of queer “counterpublics” (adapting Michael Warner’s term) through the production and circulation of texts that depict non-normative forms of sexuality.

Aubin will be participating in Renata Salecl’s seminar “The Right to Ignorance: Psychoanalysis and Secrets in Times of Surveillance,” which will help him to develop the theoretical framework for his dissertation.

For more information on the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, visit: blogs.cornell.edu/sctcu/files/2013/08/SCT_Brochure2016.e-view-1c22jsl.pdf

Alyssa Penner, Student Reader at the 2016 Graduation Ceremony

The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies graduating class of 2016 celebrated their achievements last week during Convocation at UBC’s Okanagan Campus. After years of hard work and dedication, sixty-two students graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, twenty-five students graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and thirteen Masters and PhD students completed their degree.

“All of us in FCCS are proud of the students who walked across the stage at this year’s graduation ceremony,” says FCCS Associate Dean, Dr. Marianne Legault.

Alyssa Penner, graduating with a BA with a major in French and Spanish, was chosen as this year’s Student Reader. At the ceremony, she shared a heartfelt and insightful speech with the students from this year’s graduating class.

“Being chosen as the Student Reader at my graduation ceremony was an incredible honour. After working so hard to earn my Bachelor of Arts degree, graduation was already an exciting event, and the opportunity to speak on behalf of the graduates made the day even more memorable,” says Alyssa.

This was a great opportunity for Alyssa to reflect on her time as a student, and to offer some words of advice and encouragement to her peers. Along with being asked to be the student speaker at graduation, Alyssa was also honoured by receiving the French Essay prize at the end of the semester.

“Moments like these remind me that all of the effort that I have put into my education does not go unnoticed, and I am sure that other students feel the same way! I am so glad to have been a student at UBCO, and I would not hesitate to recommend my school to other people interested in learning something new!” notes Alyssa.

FCCS Graduation Reception, June 9, 2016

After the ceremony, a reception was held in the Creative and Critical Studies building for all of the FCCS graduates and their guests to continue the celebrations of the day. Dr. Robert Eggleston, Dean pro tem addressed the attendees wishing the graduates great success as they embark on their next stages of life.

FCCS is also pleased to recognize the achievements of the following graduating or continuing students who received awards for their outstanding academic performance over this year:

• Samantha Baldwin, BA, Kelly Curtis Memorial Scholarship
• Jordan Bennett, MFA, DVC Purchase Award
• Julia Cave, BA, FCCS Cultural Studies Scholarship
• Ada Cheng, BA, FCCS Spanish Scholarship
• Jia Chen, BFA, DVC Purchase Award
• Brandon Dobroskay, BFA, FCCS Dean’s Office Purchase Award
• Sarah Ellis, BFA, Murry Johnson Memorial Award in Visual Arts
• Shannon England, BFA, Visual Arts Course Union Award
• Tyler Fey, BA in Creative Writing
• Esther-Gabrielle Roy-Cloutier, BFA, UBC Okanagan Visual Arts Award
• Jill Janvier, BFA, Frances Harris Prize in Visual Arts
• Christine Karow, BA in Art History and Visual Culture, FCCS Art History and Visual Culture Scholarship
• Tristan Knoll, BA, German Canadian Harmonie Club Prize in German Studies
• Boaz Kwok, BFA, DVC Purchase Award
• Patricia Leinemann, BFA, Elinor Yandel Memorial Award in Fine Arts
• Amy Malbeuf, MFA, Wilden Creativity Award
• Lauren Marshall, BA in Creative Writing, Creative Writing Prize
• Colby McLean Lincoln, BFA, Visual Arts Course Union Award
• Dustin Mellus, BFA, Craig Hall Visual Arts Scholarship in Printmaking
• Victoria Moore, BFA, Norma and Jack Aitken Prize in Visual Arts
• Paisley Newburn, BC, FCCS French and Spanish Scholarship
• Charlotte Nelson, BFA, Asper Family Scholarship
• Lauren Nixon, BA, FCCS French Scholarship
• Alyssa Penner, BA in French and Spanish, FCCS French Essay Prize
• Jamie Roodzant, BFA, Visual Arts Course Union Award
• Ryan Roman, BFA, DVC Purchase Award
• Sage Sidley, BFA, Doug Biden Scholarship in Visual Arts
• Laureta Stevenson, BFA, Asper Family Scholarship
• Leah Afler, BA, FCCS English Scholarship
• Maranda Wilson, BA in English, Dr. Shelley Martin Memorial Scholarship
• Shangning Zhu, BFA, FCCS Interdisciplinary Performance Scholarship

The Public Art Pollinator Pasture Project at UBC and the UBC/ Okanagan Regional Library’s “Pollinizing Sessions” will focus on events that give “how-to” advice and experience about creating pollinator-friendly habitats in the month of May.

The public is invited to attend Lori Weidenhammer’s launch of her new book, Victory Gardens for Bees: A DIY Guide to Saving the Bees (Douglas & McIntyre) www.douglas-mcintyre.com/book/victory-gardens-for-bees on Thursday, May 26, at the downtown Kelowna branch of the Okanagan Regional Library, 1380 Ellis St. Kelowna from 7 pm – 8:30 pm. Lori Weidenhammer will be giving a talk “Women Who Run with the Bees:  Artists Inspired by Bees and Artist-Led Conservation Projects” and her new book will be for sale.

Lori Weidenhammer is a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist and gardener.  She has just published a bookVictory Gardens for Bees is buzzing with DIY projects that will help readers provide homes and food for precious pollinators. For the past seven years Lori has been exploring the persona Madame Beespeaker at venues across the country, sharing the tradition of “telling the bees.” She also regularly appears as the Queen Bee at schools and community events. As an artist and educator Weidenhammer works with students of all ages on identifying native plants, eating locally, gardening for pollinators and guerrilla gardening.

Admission is free but people are encouraged to pre-register at  www.eventbrite.ca/e/lori-weidenhammer-author-and-artist-women-who-run-with-the-bees-artists-inspired-by-bees-and-artist-tickets-20131030454

The second event will occur on the weekend of May 28- 29^th when a group of volunteers will help the Pollinator Pasture team create four test patches on the Pollinator Pasture site at the Brent’s Grist Mill in Kelowna.  If you are interested in volunteering to help make these test sites and to learn four different ways to prepare highly disturbed soil for planting, contact ecoartokanagan@gmail.com to sign up for a morning’s work.

The Public Art Pollinator Pasture is a joint project between UBC Okanagan and Emily Carr University who have teamed up for a three-year partnership project with the City of Kelowna and the City Richmond to create community and public art projects around bees.  Find out more information by contacting Nancy Holmes at 250-764-9666.

The 7th Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference was held on May 5th to 7th. This conference brought together a diverse community of researchers, artists and experimenters from across North America. In its seventh year, the conference focused on “bumping zones,” liminal spaces of intersection where unique and differentiated regions of thought and discipline meet and thrive.

Conference sessions on campus

The conference was successful in accommodating over eighty attendees including graduate students, faculty, and artists from UBC Okanagan, Okanagan College, SFU, UVIC, Emily Carr, University of Alberta, University of Calgary, University of Waterloo, , and UNAM (Mexico).

As well as attending conference presentations on campus, attendees were invited to a number of events around Kelowna including visual art installations, poetry readings, and a mix-and-mingle dinner. Session presentations were scheduled in such a way as to resist the traditional approach to conference scheduling: similarity. Instead, the conference focused on putting together seemingly disparate research presentations in an effort to reveal the interwoven threads that link work across disciplines. Presentations included subjects such as reimagining the role of doctors, to feminism in puck subcultures, indigenizing the institution, and decolonization. A poetry event was held down by the shores of Lake Okanagan, featuring keynote speaker and poet Rita Wong. Rita read poetry about the responsibilities that we carry towards activist intervention in environmental degradation, our relationships to land and water, and how we are all responsible for recognizing our connection to the spaces and lands we occupy.

“A number of the conference attendees let us know how successful they felt the conference was,” says one of the organizers, Mark Buchannan, “People were impressed with the possibility of the work that happens at this campus, as well as with the interdisciplinarity between programs and researchers.”

Many attendees were happy to discover the intersections between their work and other scholars’. The conference created a space for conversations between the attendees in which to share their knowledge that may not otherwise be possible within specific disciplines. For the twenty graduate students from UBC Okanagan, this was the first time for many to be able to hear each other’s work and share their research interests.

“This was a very rewarding experience for all involved. We engaged with the UBCO community and are extremely grateful for this opportunity and to everyone who attended and presented at the conference. Recognizing the common threads that motivate us to do the work we do is critical to re-imagining a new institutional approach to changing social and environmental conditions,” noted one of the conference organizers, Karolina Bialkowska.

In addition to the presentations, there were a few exhibitions that attendees were able to attend at the Alternator as well as in the FINA gallery on campus. Attendees were able to engage with art of UBCO graduate student Krista Arias, UBCO alumni Amy Modahl, and UBCO MFA candidate Jenifer LaFrance.

Event held at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art

The organizers of this year’s conference included graduate students Karolina Bialkowska (MA English), Mark Buchannan (MA English), Tomas Jonsson (MFA), John Harrison (MA English), and Mike Unrau (PhD IGS), with faculty advising from Ashok Mathur.

A ‘remnant’ of a Peter Morin and Ayumi Goto performance called “Hair”. The rocks, removed from the natural environment to function as weights for the performing body, were then wrapped and gently re-placed where they were found….

Students are invited to register in the 2016 Indigenous Summer Intensive to be held on campus from July 4 to August 15, 2016.

Organized by the Department of Creative Studies in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, the program features a core group of senior artists: Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, David Garneau, Lee Maracle and Adrian Stimson. It will also include upwards of 20 visiting studio artists and curators in residence as part of the “K’inadas studio residency.” These artists will develop new work addressing issues related to the ongoing complex responses to reconciliation, and art-making practices as a radical methodology for decolonization and Indigenizing contemporary theoretical discourse and art praxis. These artists include:

Raymond Boisjoly; Charles Campbell; Warren Cariou; Millie Chen; Leah Decter; Kevin DeForest; Andrea Fatona; Mimi Gellman; Mark Igloriorte; Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez; Michelle Jacques; David Khang; Elizabeth Lapensée; Michelle Lavalee; Cheryl L’Hirondelle; Cathy Mattes; Tannis Nielsen; Srimoyee Mitra
Cecily Nicholson; Haruko Okano; Julie Okot-Bitek; Camille Turner; Jackson TwoBears; Olivia Whetung; Tania Willard;  and Bear Witness.

Alongside the intensive residency, FCCS is offering numerous courses in visual art, creative writing, and performance. All of these courses will run in conjunction with the Indigenous Summer Intensive. Weekly meetings for all courses will allow for a sharing of multiple voices between the residency and the students. An online component will allow participation from artists and students not located at the UBCO campus.

O k’inadas is a multi-part project that will bring together artists from various artistic disciplines to inhabit a six-week residency that will result in the production of new individual and collaborative work addressing the complexities of reconciliation practices. The artists will be mostly Indigenous, with the non-Indigenous participants drawn largely from racialized communities, countering the usual reconciliation discussion framework that depends on the pairing of European and Indigenous parties. This different formation will be a radically unique contribution to responses to colonialism, allowing for the generation of a new creative paradigm around reconciliation. Curators, artists, and writers will work together to produce a significant body of work that transcends colonial politics and art-making.

k’inadas* is a three-person artist collective formed around the Tahltan oral articulation of “walking on the land.” The purpose of this collective is to function as an organizational hub to develop creative work with larger groups of artists that address the principles and problematics of reconciliation and land-based art. The collective is comprised of: Peter Morin, Tahltan interdisciplinary and performance artist, currently Assistant Professor of Visual and Aboriginal Art at Brandon University; Stephen Foster, Haida/Metis digital artist, currently Director of the Centre for Indigenous Media Arts (CIMA) at the University of British Columbia (Okaganan); and Ayumi Goto, Japanese-Canadian performance artist, currently a doctoral candidate in Communications Studies, Simon Fraser University.

This project is supported by The Canada Council for the Arts, the McConnell Foundation, and the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus.

For course information, fccs.ok.ubc.ca/programs/summer.html

An impressive number of FCCS faculty members along with current as well as former FCCS students will be speaking in several Societies at the upcoming Congress meetings at the University of Calgary less than a month away.

The ACCUTE (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English) program includes the following FCCS faculty: Anderson Araujo, Jodey Castricano, Lisa Grekul, Janet MacArthur, and Shirley Ann McDonald. Six of our current graduate students–Mathieu Aubin, Karolina Bialkowska, Mark Buchanan, Peter Hiles, Cole Mash, Daryl Ritchot, as well our former graduate student Shandell Houlden, now doing her Ph.D. at McMaster—are also presenting at ACCUTE.

Other faculty members attending Congress this year include Michael Treschow, presenting in the Canadian Society of Patristic Studies, Bernard Schulz-Cruz, presenting in the Canadian Association of Hispanists, and Virginie Magnat, presenting in the Canadian Association for Theatre Research.

The Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies program includes Constance Crompton, who is speaking on a Digital Humanities Roundtable, Margaret Reeves, speaking on early modern children’s reading practices, as well as two current FCCS graduate students, Gwen Pierce and Daryl Ritchot, and one former FCCS English major, Brandon Taylor, now doing graduate studies at the University of Victoria.

Another FCCS faculty member, Ashok Mathur, has organized a panel for the Indigenous Literary Studies Association, and is convening a conversational session that includes FCCS graduate students Karolina Bialkowska, Amberley John, and Monica Good as well as IKBSAS students Krista Arias, Lindsay Harris, and David Lacho.  Prof. Mathur is also presenting new poetic work in an ILSA round table responding to the literary contributions of Métis writer Sharron Proulx.

For information on the associations mentioned above, please see:

ACCUTE: accute.ca

ACH:  www.hispanistas.ca/inicio.html

CATR:  catracrt.ca

CSPS:  www.ccsr.ca/csps

CSRS: www.csrs-scer.ca/congress.htm

ILSA: www.indigenousliterarystudies.org